Can Xue - Five Spice Street

I ask you, if a person wasn’t a lunatic and possessed common sense, would she have the guts to announce publicly that she wanted to ‘‘normalize’’ a relationship with an adulterous lover? Absurd! As a matter of boasting, it’s probably okay, but she said it with an unusually serious and frightening expression to passersby who had nothing to do with it! I hate it, hate it, hate it! Let her go to the North Pole to normalize her relationship! Let her go to some doghouse to normalize her relationship! Just don’t do it on our Five Spice Street. We don’t approve of this kind of ‘‘normalization.’’ Sooner or later we would expunge this man and this woman’s existence from the stenographer’s historical records and never mention their ‘‘normalization’’ again. If C is right and her mind is normal, wouldn’t all our elites, as well as ordinary people, be lunatics? This C was the source of evil: he ruined everything. With his above-average petty trick, he had almost reversed the wheels of history. Luckily we had the insight to refute his argument swiftly. What a great danger we averted! But for this, these three might have forced themselves into Old Meng’s loft when no one was watching and made it their beachhead. It would have been a thorn in the flesh of the people of Five Spice Street and would have remained an iron reality! Then the stenographer would have had to record this damn thing in his notebook! The optimists might think that even if the plot were realized, it would have been only temporary: in the end, they would have been swept into the dustbin of history. This is wrong. What is most frightening? A latent virus. For example, C had been lying low for eight years or maybe twelve and eventually created this major uproar. After eight or twelve years, what kind of unbearable situation would result from these three viruses lying low in Old Meng’s loft? Friends, you must never be off guard, you must never be careless when seriously discussing theoretical questions. Let us continue to be acutely aware of reality. Let us strictly prevent viruses from invading! This time, X unscrupulously announced that she would ‘‘normalize.’’ Next time, life-and-death warfare may befall us! In general, though, there won’t be any warfare, because she will completely fall apart: how is she qualified to battle with us? Ha!

Having brought the story to this point, the writer has left innumerable issues hanging. The story cannot end here. Everyone on Five Spice Street knows it’s not over. So the writer must do his best to clarify the mess piece by piece. It has no beginning (‘‘The Beginning’’ is merely an assumption), and has no ending, either. If earth and sun collide, the story may end but will no doubt begin again on another planet. The writer’s task is like boring into the maze of a gigantic anthill, but he cannot shirk it. He knows through experience that only the methods of abstract art, used in diagramming each aspect of the maze, will enable him to lead readers to grasp the ‘‘general idea,’’ even if they can’t find their way through the specifics. This is the fascination of art. Though it can’t be fathomed, it has supreme influence. Only the heartless and coarse have nothing to do with art.

The First Diagram of the Maze

Does Madam X really exist? Why does she exist on Five Spice Street? It seems too late to raise this question. Could we have described such a complex historical episode, duping vast numbers of readers, if it turned out to be nothing but trumped-up nonsense? Would we do this just for fun? It isn’t so simple, beloved readers. We are all mutually dependent. The lesson taught me that you are closer to me than my parents, and more important, too. I would never be flippant with any of you. My objective is only to kindle doubts and criticisms, to purify our ideological dimension. After the writer’s investigation, which has undergone scrupulous examination, and after compiling various opinions, he decided that the following questions were worth consideration.

First of all, this Madam X was no genius. Aside from her work in the snack shop and her deceptive sorcery, she had no special skill. On our Five Spice Street, very few geniuses (for example, the writer and the widow) were truly aloof. It appears that Madam X is really a lonely person; indeed, she’s even lonelier than the writer or the widow. She kept secrets not only from her husband but also from her lover Mr. Q. Everything she did resembled an improvisational act. Had she ever revealed any of her innermost feelings? Absolutely not, not even a hint. Only geniuses are mighty. And the mightiest are the loneliest. X is neither a genius nor is she mighty, yet she is inscrutably lonely. What on earth is she? Perhaps this person does not exist at all. Is it possible that she is merely a figment of our imagination, an expression of our collective consciousness?

Just this morning, however, the writer saw her selling beans on Five Spice Street! She was tying an apron around herself. Her hands were rough. Aside from the expression in her eyes, which were still unusually empty, she was no different from anyone else. Hardly a genius, she wasn’t even part of the elite (she had never been close to our intellectuals; instead, she seemed to stay as far away as possible). The writer had once seen Mr. Q suggest timidly that he perhaps belonged to the elite stratum; all at once, she flushed. ‘‘Hunh,’’ she said, ‘‘luckily, I can’t read. It is a great advantage.’’ Mr. Q’s face turned red. Where had this weirdo come from? How could she reside on Five Spice Street?

It seemed that we had to investigate this from another angle. We couldn’t keep focusing on X herself but had to return to our own concepts, carefully straighten them out and test them, and learn where the defects lay so that the mistakes could be corrected. Of course, we couldn’t do this without aesthetic awareness. Aesthetic awareness was always the wellspring of our creation.

The writer started his work by analyzing the concept of loneliness: what essential difference was there between Madam X’s loneliness and the loneliness of real geniuses? The loneliness of geniuses was a thing that surpassed reality and surpassed space and time. One was born with it. No one could imitate it. This type of rare person is usually sitting on a deserted mountaintop or the roof of a thatched cottage (like C; of course C wasn’t a genius-he merely imitated one remarkably well) while engaging in conversation with the gods. His body gives off golden rays. Ordinary mortals like us cannot hear that dialogue. He is a static sage or a fossil. Only the highly cultured who rid themselves of selfish ideas can sometimes recognize him when they look up. He doesn’t always sit on a mountaintop or the roof of a thatched cottage to maintain his solitude. He also has an uncommon warmth and attentiveness for humankind. His solitude consists in always walking in the vanguard of history, and humankind doesn’t understand him in time. When he comes down from the mountain- top or the roof of the thatched cottage, he becomes one of us: there’s no way to tell him apart. He participates in ordinary affairs and perseveres in guiding others. He transmits the macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds he has seen from the mountaintop or the roof of the thatched cottage and leads everyone to propel the wheels of history forward. In his lifetime, the writer has met one or two such sages. It’s easy for the same types to recognize each other.

What is Madam X’s solitude? The writer considered this exhaustively and concluded it was a wholly morbid thing. Her solitude resulted from obstinacy. A person who neither converses with the gods nor possesses education and who practices that sort of common trade isn’t elevated above the crowds. Her haughtiness and disdain arise from inner weakness and manifest her struggle to achieve selfish ends. This morbidity is as follows: against all reason, she is able to make her eyes ‘‘retire’’ so that they no longer ‘‘see any people.’’ She can actually grow a plate of armor over her whole body so that ‘‘nothing can penetrate it’’ and ‘‘she doesn’t feel any outside attack.’’ Her way of interacting with ordinary people is bizarre: she calls them by random names. Even more annoying: she fakes the loneliness of geniuses in order to delude everyone! Who’s interested in the solitude of an ice cave? If she died in that cave, no one would know or be alarmed. The ice would seal the cave for years and no one would notice! Her loneliness is part and parcel of her own madness; it has nothing to do with ordinary people. She had definitely better not try to identify it with the loneliness of our geniuses. While we accepted Madam X’s impersonal existence on Five Spice Street, some confused people sometimes forgot that she was just a sick, inferior person. They were mistaken about some of her odd behavior. They got excited about it and raised X’s image, forming a dense fog around her. Outsiders who didn’t know the whole story would think Madam X was some kind of genius. Only because of this did people question whether Madam X was real, and why she existed on Five Spice Street. This question grew bigger by the day and branched out. It became mysterious and inexplicable. If pursued to the end, this train of thought would exhaust anyone to death-no matter how erudite. The writer’s conclusion was: Madam X’s loneliness was essential to her individual psychosis and wasn’t at all worth investigating.